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Hello there, you are on the Internet. Assuming this is not your first time ever diving into this brave, wacky experiment that’s been a cornerstone of human society for the past 15 years, you are almost certainly aware of two things: 1) Porn. 2) A screenshot of an alleged Valve change log that recently leaked, more or less revealing the existence of Left 4 Dead 3 and Source Engine 2. I decided to get in touch with a few sources (hah, I guess) close to Valve for verification and a few scant details.

First up, the most important detail: yes, the image – which references L4D3 and Source 2 in multiple subject lines – is 100 percent real. Multiple sources, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed as much. For the moment, at least, it’s probably safe to assume that both are in development.

More interestingly, one source also pointed to another, slightly less-publicized email leak from a couple months ago that referenced Left 4 Dead 3 (with nearly 70 developers to its name), Source 2, and Half-Life 3, in addition to smaller scale mystery projects like “Cries Unheard” and “Microbe Wars”. The source declined to comment any further, but specifically pointed to it as something else well worth looking at. It should be noted, however, that the leak in question referenced some outdated information – including employees who had since departed from the shadowy mega-studio.

Contrasting that to an extent, further rumblings – verified by multiple sources but not really elaborated upon because Valve – suggest an internal feeling of change in recent times due to the success of potentially un-ending mainstay games like Valve’s own DOTA 2 and League of Legends. Perhaps expect fewer short-lived, more traditional games out of the gated Newelltopia, but note that I am only speculating about what might happen as a result of Valve’s apparent change in direction.

I’ve requested official comment from Valve, but heard nothing back so far. I’ll update this story if I do.

So there’s all I have at the moment. I plan to dig more, but even sources willing to speak were pretty tight-lipped, mostly preferring to nod yes or no to tiny tidbits from the Internet/other sources. If I find out anything else, you’ll hear about it. Well, assuming Valve’s infamous secret-keeping squads aren’t out for my head right this very secon–

81 Comments

Almost as shocking as the European Team Fortress 2 Mann Up MVM servers being down for over a week and a half. Pretty sure they’ve been re-purposed for DOTA2 with their “new direction” which is a shame, pretty sure they Valve were milking at least £3 a day out of my addiction!

Can’t really care about any new Valve games until my little addiction is restored. I have the shakes and queuing for 15 minutes before dumping me into a 3 figure ping server isn’t cutting it. Like bad crack rocks (I assume)

Source 2, yes. HL3, no. He has been talking about Ricochet 2 which many took for a likely tongue in cheek reference to HL3, but he could just have been joking. I wouldn’t call it “confirmed” in any case.

That still looks pretty damn indirect to me. There’s no mention of Half-Life 3 anywhere. I think it was just a Valve-time joke. It’s certainly a long, long way from anything approaching what I’d call a confirmation.

Here’s that video in case anyone wants to point out any subtle clues I’ve missed.

Come on… Its Gabe, hardening a crowbar, saying “These things… they take time!”

I don’t remember Gabe trolling anyone this much, but I do remember him saying they don’t want to officially announce anything until they are 100% sure of the release date now, which seems to be the case with half-life.

That vid..
It’s so spot on it makes me wonder how Clang didn’t raise ten times as much as the funding goal.
Whoever came up with that pitch video could probably convince me to buy peach flavored NA beer.

It isn’t that surprising, but it’s another very strong confirmation of the massive shift in Valve’s priorities. To put this in perspective, the first L4D was released after HL2:E2. And now it’s getting a second sequel.

It also won’t be surprising when they reveal that L4D3 is going to be free to play, with hats.

“Contrasting that to an extent, further rumblings – verified by multiple sources but not really elaborated upon because Valve – suggest an internal feeling of change in recent times due to the success of potentially un-ending mainstay games like Valve’s own DOTA 2 and League of Legends.”

They’ve said as much forever. Remember when they intimated that Portal 2 might be their last single player game? What if they…weren’t making that up? Valve is basically a software-and-service company right now. Dota 2 is going to make them a zillion dollars and occupy them for a decade, and they didn’t even design it to begin with. I’d imagine HL3 is a pretty low priority for them at this point; probably something like a prestige project and a bit of an advertisement for Source 2.

Valve is privately owned, and that gives me at least hope that Gabe &co. aren’t necessarily solely motivated by profits as public companies are. I’m sure many of them are already inordinately wealthy, and Valve gets enough income from Steam to sustain whatever batshit crazy projects they want to experiment with.

That said, it’s also entirely possible that they find this new direction “more interesting” and assume it is a good model for making games (or is incentivised by their weird internal allegedly utopian structure), and so could abandon the kind of single player games I care about without it being just because DotA 2 is the fattest of cash cows.

More importantly, what happened to the Steam Box dev kits that were supposed to ship in June? And why is no one wondering or asking what happened to them? Was that the secret-keeping squads too? *looks around nervously*

Thanks for the link, hadn’t been that much interested in the Steam Box per se but hadn’t realised it had been thrown under the bus. And it sounds like Valve can be a shit place to work if you aren’t ‘part of the culture’ and in with powers that be. Seems like everyone in Valve wants to work on safe things like designing hats which possibly explains their pisspoor level of innovation over the last decade or so.

Edit: Although from the 30 minutes or so of the video I’ve watched it seems she was working on some other bit of h/w that sounds much more interesting than the Steam Box. Possibly the SB is still staggering along.

AFAIK, she was working on various hardware ideas, including the SteamBox and (IIRC) an internal VR headset. Also, AFAIK, the entire hardware staff is gone. They might have the box on the backburner, but I can’t realistically see Valve releasing a console or any other notable hardware at this point. MS and Sony are geared up to the teeth to wage war this upcoming console generation and they have stocked their warchests with huge amounts of funds. It would be immensely costly for Valve to compete with them, and the other kinds of cool tech (like streaming from your PC to your TV) is already in the works by other companies. So, Valve can either compete against two entrenched behemoths that are willing to toss billions to ensure their victory (and potentially lose billions if it doesn’t work out well for them) or they can compete against more niche tech where numerous competitors already have workable solutions coming to market.

In the end, releasing any kind of hardware, be it a full-on console or even a middle-ground solution (like a streaming box) requires a lot of capital, a lot of employees, a lot of legal work, a lot of contracts, a lot space, and a lot of headaches. You have to ask yourself, is it worth it? I think Gabe did just that and decided that the frustrations and additional overhead that such a thing would bring is simply not worth it. Remember, Gabe is a huge Texas Hold ‘Em player and I’m more than certain he has weighed the risks and properly assessed them.

I also take Ellsworth’s words with a grain of salt. She alludes, several times, to how she wasn’t allowed to make her own teams and hire specific people. That’s because that’s not how Valve works, apparently, and I don’t know why she thought she should be allowed to be an exception to that. It seems to me, and through no fault of her own, that her work ethic and workplace style just wasn’t compatible with how Valve is run. It’s not her fault, it’s not Valve’s fault, it just simply is. Some places require working from home. Some people are horrible at working from home. It doesn’t make the business suck and it doesn’t make those that can’t work well from home suck, it’s just that there’s a compatibility problem regarding the workplace and work ethos.

This wasn’t about money – she and her team are working on the same thing they worked at Valve, but now as an independent company – Gabe singed off everything to her. They are planning a Kickstarter route, the product is 3D glasses without screens without any bulk at all, with ability of 3d manipulation, exact head tracking, with ability to get up close to models and look inside, look around them (physically, like standing up and walking arond) or above them, to make 3d sound – like holding your ear to closer to something you hear more, with multiple people supported on the same “screen”, with multiplayer across screens – for about 200$.

Frankly, to hell with Source2 or L4D or HL3 – I think what she is doing is an order of magnitude more interesting. The catch is – they are more focused on a hardware side, but since it will be very developer friendly I’m sure software and games won’t be a problem.

There are no confirmed reports that those layoffs had anything to do with Steam Box, or that any of them were working on it. Last time I checked Greg Coomer was leader of the Steam Box team, and he’s still at Valve.

If there has even been a hint that the layoffs were Steam Box related, I think the world’s tech media would have run “STEAM BOX DEAD” kind of headlines.

It is nice to have them versioned for say testers to grab. Something like samba share works too, but then you have to do something extra for differential sync…
VCS is there anyway and current VCS’s have no problems handling binaries so why not use it?

It would be sad if they really are shifting focus, since none of their multiplayer titles do much for me (I mean, TF2 is the best multiplayer shooting experience I’ve had but it’s still not much of a draw for my time). Understandable, but sad.

yeah… I’m not the least bit interested in dota2 either. I thought they had this indie-mentality where every team just works on whatever they’re interested in at the moment. Now we’re hearing that they’re going the money-grubbing route like they’re EA or something.

Possible… Look at revision numbers – that list is clearly filtered, probably excluding changes to any other announced projects. And in the projects column there are changesets for steam, web, source2, and dota – but nothing from 5th project – probably “unreleased games”

This IS perforce, so much for that theory :/ didn’t know about sparse version numbers, thought global repository versions (if there are any) should either be consequential or some kind of uids..

At the surface though this indeed looks like unfiltered log – there are completely different changesets, like some PHP fix for web mixed with new quest for DOTA mixed with steam DLC enhancements mixed with source2 changes… Can’t imagine who would need a filter with all of that.

If Valve really decides that more games like Dota 2 and TF2 are going to be their future, then count me out. Best of luck to them, but I’m out. And while I’m sure they’ll still rake in the dough (probably more than ever), I think a lot of the people who’ve been with them since day one will be out too. Sad times, I hope it doesn’t actually go down that way.

I think it’s comical that people are so surprised by and excited about this reveal. I always thought the Left 4 Dead games were quite overrated myself. The first one was extremely fun until you caught onto the pattern and each level became a chore to play through. Unless they do something drastically different with the third, I’m sure it will be quite overrated as well.